In a culture overwhelmed by phony sports-religion — the cathedral ballparks, the demigod players, the rituals of trades and drafts, the fantasy-league cults of fandom — it's easy to forget that sports still possess a seed of the genuinely sacred. You have to wipe away so much corruption and drugs and bloodlust to see it, but sports belong to what is pure and good in the difficult and degrading world of men. This month, those of us who love sport but hate all that surrounds it will have to suffer through another orgy of blasphemous pageantry, and it's the perfect occasion to confront a crisis whose consequences stretch beyond stadiums. Spectacle isn't just ruining everything we love about the Olympics or even the wider world of sports — it's ruining the capacity for spontaneous joy that makes us who we are.

Start with the Olympics' opening ceremonies, which billions of people watch but nobody really enjoys: acrobats twirling in amazing pointlessness, pom-poms and stilts and mime makeup, athletes smiling and waving to nobody in particular, a celebrity lighting a big flaming cauldron. The only countries any good at it are either Nazi or Communist. The Germans invented the lighting of the sacred fire, and the first torch relay moved through countries the Third Reich was soon to conquer. Seventy-two years later, the totalitarian government of Beijing demonstrated its ability to coordinate fifteen thousand people in meticulous synchronization, which was awesome and terrifying in equal measure. David Atkins, the executive producer of Vancouver's opening ceremonies, knows he has an impossible job keeping up with that level of mass control; he described the Beijing ceremony to me as "Elvis's last show": "Nobody, moving forward, will attempt to compete with it." No doubt he's right, since in my experience, the only activity you could coordinate fifteen thousand Canadians to synchronize is complaining about the United States. I mean that as a compliment to Canada: Mass orchestration is inhuman, but it's also boring, and it's why real-time Olympics Webcasts of, say, cross-country skiing or speed skating are so much more captivating than all those deadening prime-time-TV productions of figure skating, as prepackaged and formulaic as any episode of Lost. All the spontaneity — both the athletes' and the audience's — is edited out and interrupted for endless commercial breaks.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

And it's not just the Olympics. As anyone who's attended a professional game lately knows too well, spectacle is swallowing sport everywhere. A ticket to a game today is a ticket to many ugly scenes that nobody should be forced to witness: skinny girls shaking their asses to old-school hip-hop, T-shirts fired into crowds willing to tear one another apart, dogs jumping through hoops at halftime for the pleasure of ADHD children. The L.A. Dodgers now have yoga in the outfield, and knitting nights have spread across the league. They call it Stitch N' Pitch. And with the exception of a few holdouts like Wrigley Field — easily one of the most important structures in North America and possibly imperiled by the recent bankruptcy of the Chicago Cubs — we have new stadiums designed to maximize the number of luxury boxes and cheesy bars.

And yet I continue to believe in sport's holiness. I don't mean that loosely or metaphorically. Sports are holy. For the ancient Maya and the Aztecs, the most important religious festivals always involved the playing of the ball game, which sometimes ended in human sacrifice. For the Greeks, athletic competition was a way of demonstrating "arete" — a nearly untranslatable word meaning spontaneous excellence or vitality, a human being human perfectly. Which is why the ancient Olympics included competitions in poetry and music, and why they happened in the nude: We go to sports to see what men are. Sports celebrate an event during which anything can happen, capturing, as nothing else can, life's basic unpredictability, and they show us how to live: We are supposed to face life's uncertainty with the best we have. Contemporary sports, despite the ice floes of shit they have to navigate, still manage to produce many sublime moments, but every year these bright lights grow harder to spot against the gathering gloom of the business of entertainment.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

In a world of gears and slipstreams, where humanity is hemmed in daily by regulations and corporations, the gift of sports is realness and nowness — what Walter Benjamin called the Jetztzeit. Which is why the corruption of sports into empty entertainment is so uniquely soul destroying, so insidiously corrosive to culture as a whole, and it's why the Olympics are so, so rotten. Even the way the host cities are chosen is a parody of honest competition, a spectacle falsely presented as a contest. The IOC has always been a world leader in the Fix: I mean, it takes a lot to beat Chicago in the fine art of backroom dealing, but is there any other plausible explanation for the Obama Humiliation in Copenhagen?

I'm not alone in loving sports and despising their spectacle, but what is to become of us? Are we to be consigned to watch Friday Night Lights with our sons? Are we supposed to say to them, Look, that's how sports are supposed to be? The only other solution is a kind of partial blindness, a willful stupidity. I've promised myself this year that I am not going to wallow in the easy cynicism that usually settles on me like the flu for the Olympic fortnight. I'm going to forget about the ceremonies and I'm going to remember that curling — especially women's curling — is fun to watch, and that the biathlon is pretty cool when all is said and done. And when the inevitable doping scandal hits, or the judges fix figure skating again, I'm going to change the channel to short-track speed skating or luge.

And then I'll remember that next month is March Madness, and all will be well.

A Part of Hearst Digital Media
Esquire participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.